Decolonizing Educational Leadership: Exploring Alternative Approaches to Leading Schools

By Ann E. Lopez

This book offers new ways of engagement for leaders seeking to connect theory to practice in decolonizing education. In the current climate where xenophobia, anti-immigrant sentiments, and other forms of exclusion make up much of the discourse, educational leaders need to seek ways to foreground other forms of knowledge and transfer them into their daily leadership practices. Lopez contributes to other critical leadership approaches while foregrounding a decolonizing approach that unsettles the coloniality manifested in education and school practices. Chapters provide school leaders with examples of ways they can challenge coloniality, white supremacy, and other forms of oppression in schooling that negatively impact some students and their educational outcomes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Jan 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9783030623807

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

A. E. LopezDecolonizing Educational Leadershiphttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62380-7_1

1. Introduction: Toward a Theory of Decolonizing Educational Leadership

Ann E. Lopez¹  

(1)

Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

Ann E. Lopez

Email: [e-mail]

Abstract

This chapter situates this volume in my ontological experiences, professionally and personally. It examines ways in which education and schooling embrace social organizing practices grounded in the knowledge of colonizers. It explores ways in which education continues to be a colonial project and the manifestations of settler colonialism present in everyday schooling practices. It situates the book and notions of decolonizing educational leadership in current social and political contexts and movements for social change. This chapter highlights focus of the subsequent chapters in this volume which includes challenges and possibilities of educational leadership, coloniality, decolonizing the mind, restoring capcity, re-centering and reconnecting, and moving forward.

Keywords

PositionalityColonial projectColonialismSettler colonialism

I spent eighteen years as a secondary classroom teacher and school administrator before being hired fulltime into academia. The last three of those eighteen years I spent as a seconded instructor¹ in the Bachelor of Education program at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). Over those eighteen years I have seen some teachers and administrators being agentive in responding to the needs of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) students and some outrightly engaging in racist behaviors. Students also shared stories about their experiences. When I became an administrator, I saw the impact of leadership on the overall schooling experiences of students. This went beyond pedagogy to the areas of discipline, school culture, hiring of teachers, allocation of resources, and basically all activities that take place in a school. I also witnessed oppressive leadership practices where Black and Brown students were given harsher suspensions, the so-called good kid—which often was a White student—got a slap on the wrist, while Black students were given in-school suspensions or sent home. I witnessed the harsh tone in which some parents were spoken to, and the ‘policing’ of primarily Black students. At the last school where I worked as an administrator before being seconded to OISE, most of the students had an Individual Education Plan (IEP), and were predominantly Black boys, poor White students, many of whom were labeled behavioral, and sent to the contact room for support. Through these experiences I realized the impact that school leaders can make on students’ educational outcomes and lives, and the possibilities for challenging discrimination and oppression through intentional leadership practices.

As I reflect on schooling practices and engage in research with school leaders in different contexts the continued presence of coloniality in education is evident. This includes discrimination, oppression, and exclusion based on aspects of students’ intersecting identities such as ability, class, social economic status, language, religion, race, sexuality, and other markers of identity; ways in which knowledge and power are embedded in policies and the organizational structures of schools; and silencing of some groups. The continued presence of coloniality in schooling, colonial and hegemonic narratives, is not only present in Western countries but also in former colonies and the Global South. Scholars such as Marie Battiste, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Albert Memmi, and others point to ways in which schooling and education is used as a vehicle to perpetuate colonialism in many forms long after physical colonial domination has ended. My earlier works were framed through social justice and culturally responsive leadership theorizing, where coloniality was not foregrounded. In this volume, I am arguing that the presence of coloniality in education must be named and disrupted in all aspects of schooling, and in particular educational and school leadership through decolonizing education ; and for school leaders to be supported to take up, engage in, and advance this work.

Positionality

I am a Black woman born and raised in Jamaica—a former British colony. My experiences growing up and education were informed by the colonial education system installed in Jamaica by the British. I was also impacted by my grandmother who was a constant presence in her grandchildren’s lives. She was kind and caring to everyone and had words of wisdom for every situation. She nurtured my love for reading and shared numerous stories that were passed down to her from her parents and grandparents. Through these stories I became interested in learning more about Jamaica’s history, and my ancestors. As a child growing up, I was fascinated with the stories of the enslaved who had fought British rule such as Nanny of the Maroons rebel leader and Jamaican National Hero. I also read about the decimation of the Arawak Indians (also called Tainos)—the Indigenous people of Jamaica—by the Europeans. They came from South America and named the island Xaymaca, which meant land of wood and water. These stories planted a seed and desire to learn more about my African ancestors, a history that was not taught in school. This interest was further peaked when I entered the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus in Kingston, and engaged with the work of Walter Rodney, Frantz Fanon, and other postcolonial scholars. The former Prime Minister of Jamaica Michael Manley, also a postcolonial scholar, raised the impact and legacy of colonialism not only on the island of Jamaica but former colonies on the continent of Africa, Asia and in the West. These experiences while growing up in Jamaica, the impact of my colonial education, and my desire to understand my roots, as we say in Jamaica, formed my lens of decolonization, and anti-colonial and anti-racist education. This desire to embrace my Blackness and disrupt the impact of colonial education led me to see education and schooling as sites of change and resistance. As a secondary school teacher and administrator in one of Canada’s largest school boards further cemented my desire to engage in decolonizing praxis. Decolonial thinking is not new and existed since the inception of modern forms of colonization and is an unfinished project that is still unfolding (Maldonado-Torres, 2011). As a descendant of the enslaved, how I show up in spaces personally and professionally matter. I choose to show up grounded in the African knowledges of my ancestors and surrounded by their spirit. As Wane (2019) asserts:

Indigenous knowledges are lived experiences and they are ways and systems of being and seeing. In these knowledges we ground our experiential practices and our theoretical systems. In other words, African ways of knowing inform their practice and vice versa. (p. 13)

These knowledges are passed on through multiple generations (McGadney-Douglass & Douglass, 2008).

Education as a Colonial Project

Settlercolonialisminvaded communities resulting in epistemic violence on Indigenous and colonized people everywhere. This was done through education by destroying the ways of knowing and culture of those they colonized. The goal of colonizers and the colonizing enterprise was to create homogenous understandings of social organizing practices built around authority and leadership, and centered the knowledge of the colonizers (Prakash & Esteva, 2008). Garcia and Natividad (2018) note that even though education is touted as social mobility and freedom for Indigenous peoples [including Indigenous peoples of Africa and other colonized spaces], the politics of knowledge production and dissemination are ultimately tied to modern Western ordering of the world (p. 28).

The manifestations of settler colonialism in education is the stripping away from local communities their identities and forms of cultural initiation (Prakash & Esteva, 2008). Educational policies have stripped students of their languages, promoted monolingualism, and positioned multilingualism as a challenge (Crawford, 2000). Ngu͂gĩ wa Thiong’o (1986), Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, wrote about the systematic destruction of Kenyan tribal languages in schools. In Jamaica the local dialect patois was shunned, and schools to educate girls and boys steeped in the knowledge of the colonizers were set up all across the island. These schools are still in operation today with the history and knowledge of the colonizers revered in school songs, school systems, and culture of schools.

The power of colonizing knowledge and the potential for taking hold and moving through generations is evident in schooling practices and customs such as school songs and school names in the former colonies like Jamaica. The current school song of a secondary school in Jamaica references Dickenson and Munro and their effort to train the youth and supposedly for which the colonized are grateful. To educate demands great care, so honour much the worthy pair, who gave their means and nobly planned, to train the youths of this fair land (Hamptonschool.edu, 2020). This song goes on so loudly let your praises flow to Dickenson and Hugh Munro (Hamptonschool.edu, 2020).

The violence of colonialism is not only limited to occupation of land and resources, but extends to the occupation of mind and being (Bulhan, 2015). Garcia and Natividad (2018) suggest that the colonial project of education is also present in higher education, as evidenced by the lack of Indigenous and local customs and traditions at universities in the West, and they have been used as tools for acculturation. Institutions of higher education solidified coloniality of power and white supremacy, and we continue to see vestiges of this racial/colonial project as evidenced by an inequitable access to and graduation from postsecondary education for racially minoritized students (Dache-Gerbino, 2017, as cited in Garcia & Natividad, 2018).

The world is engulfed in turmoil as people who have been denied justice take to the streets to call for the dismantling of white supremacy, systemic racism and oppression, end to anti-Black racism, anti-Indigenous racism, and neoliberal policies that have marginalized and oppressed some groups and in particular Black, Indigenous, People of Color. Moments and movements capture the linkages between colonialism, racism, and other forms of dehumanization (Maldonado-Torres, 2011). This linkage has led to educators and people in all areas of social and political life to pursue decolonization